You Get What You Pay For
The year was 2016. Baseball fans insisted that the Chicago Cubs would never win the world series, and political modeling insisted that Donald Trump was a carnival barker who would never win the presidency. Less publicly, your humble blogger was attempting to secure some contract consulting work analyzing a grotesque document filled with equations that just would not behave.
I stated my hourly rate. My would-be client asserted that somewhere, in the halls of an Ivy-league school a thousand miles away, lingered some math major willing to take the project for less. I advised the prospect to hire that theoretically-gifted soul and enjoy the superior rate.
In hiring a consultancy, one does not simply hire technical expertise. Frankly, 21-year-old me would wipe the floor with 38-year-old me on almost any examination of mathematical acumen. Why? Because when the 21-year-old wasn’t retrieving ping pong balls from cups of beer in Princeton, he was working through proofs and problem sets during hours typically reserved for more entertaining hijinx. So why not hire that guy?1
So, this brings us back to 2016 and the quest for mathematical competence. A couple months elapsed, my would-be client spent a few thousand dubloons upon some quantitatively savvy but professionally overwhelmed upperclassman, and predictably, the results were, well, nil. He called me back, inquiring, “Are you still willing to work at the rate you mentioned a few months ago?” Indeed I was.
Mr. Math Genius fixates upon the inscrutable tome of equations. Dr. Cynical Ex-Academic, Subprime-Collapse-Observer sits 20 hours with a pencil, a notebook, several massive cups of coffee, and takes some notes. Nary a calculation is attempted until the true business problem reveals itself. Then, after a few clarifying conversations and a few mediocre metaphors (the winding road to maturity on my end is ongoing…), a path forward appears. In my case, after a couple short weeks, the job was done. Despite my higher hourly rate, the client’s total cost was (much) lower, especially considering the first guy never actually reached the root of the matter.
Slow is fast. Experience saves money. You would never hire the cheapest-available plumber when faced with a sewage-related horror. Why hire developers and data scientists that way?
AE is not the cheapest provider of its services. The question is, are you attempting to minimize costs or maximize value? Mr. math genius would have minimized costs (in the short-term anyway), but left enormous value on the table. And like many of AE’s clients, my client wound up paying the higher rate in the end. His highest potential ROI would have been achieved by selecting the experienced hand in the first place - a crude price comparison turned out to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Is your aspiration a working MVP, an innovative model with scalable ROI, or a user experience that keeps ‘em coming back for more? Then the difference between mediocre and good, much less good and great is much larger than the difference in rates paid. Experience, perspective, insight, pragmatism, and nuance manifest exponentially when projects are delivered.
We get clients to market faster, with better product fit, and more scalable software. We provide insight into strategy and tactics as products are conceived, implemented, and launched. How much value would you assign to excellence along those axes?
Communication skills, experience with startups and enterprises alike, and being fantastic to work with2 build better relationships with clients, and ultimately, better products. None of the above are free. All of the above are cheaper than the alternatives - much cheaper. We aren’t the dorm-bound math major. We’re the savvy scientists and been-around-the-block developers who can help you reach for the stars. And with us, you get what you pay for - and then some.
1 A brief vignette tells a fascinating story of a plumber-turned-developer:
Take, for example, the day he got a call about an unexplained odor in a suburban shopping strip. Daniel and a coworker headed to the scene. There was no mistaking the smell. It was sewage, and it was raw….
“How do you troubleshoot a mall?
There was nothing to do but work the problem step by step. Over the next three days, Daniel and his partner worked over the building from opposite ends, unsealing and re-fitting every plumbing fixture they could find. Eventually, they narrowed the source of the mystery airflow down to two possible locations: a hair salon and a restaurant.
This is where the problem got extra tricky. How do you troubleshoot the plumbing in a restaurant without, you know, closing down the restaurant? Eventually Daniel had a bright idea: a smoke test. Literally. Up to the roof vents he went, armed with smoke bombs. His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight."
Sure enough, following the clouds of smoke cleared up the mystery. Someone had tied the vent hood for the restaurant's stove into the sewer system, forcing air into the pipes. The immediate problem might be solved, but Daniel's desire to leave plumbing, maybe even to a job where he could choose what to smell, was only growing.
He wasn’t debugging code, but Daniel gained experience disassembling problems and devising solutions, while simultaneously recognizing his constraints. When he decided to learn how to code, he was more than a developer–he was a problem-solver, olfactory or otherwise.
2 Whether it’s a venture network we enable, managing ad space inventory for publishers, or clients for whom we write stellar code…